Whether a woman is lean or overweight during her
pregnancy may influence the likelihood of her child becoming an overweight or
obese adult, ARS-funded research with laboratory rats suggests. Photo
courtesy of Microsoft Clipart.

Baby's Obesity Risk: What's Mom's Influence?

Aspiring moms may be advised to
achieve a healthy weight before they become pregnant, and to gain only the
recommended amount of weight during their pregnancy. Now ongoing studies by
Agricultural Research Service
(ARS)-funded investigator
Kartik
Shankar and colleagues could provide new insights into those
recommendations.

Shankar is taking a new, closer look at how influences that occur in the
womband perhaps during the first few months of lifemight affect
development of a child's ability to regulate his or her weight later in life.

In fact, the child's body-weight-regulating mechanisms might be permanently
altered by maternal signals associated with the mother's own overweight,
according to Shankar. Such maternal programming of the unborn child could
increase the risk that the child would become an overweight or obese adult and
would have a higher risk of obesity-related afflictions.

Shankar looked at weight gains among rat pups whose dads were lean and whose
mothers, called "dams," were either lean or overweight (from
overfeeding) before conception and throughout pregnancy.

All offspring were of normal weight at birth and at weaning. However, when
the weaned offspring were given free access to an unlimited amount of high-fat
rations, the offspring of overweight dams showed remarkable sensitivity to the
high-fat rations. They gained significantly more weight, and more of that
weight as fat mass, than did the offspring of lean dams.

The study strongly suggests that exposure to the mother's obesity while in
the womb results in programming of the offspring's metabolism and
body-weight-control mechanisms. The dams' obesity alone was sufficient to
significantly increase the pups' susceptibility to obesity.

Read
more about this research in the March 2010 issue of Agricultural
Research magazine.

ARS is the principal intramural scientific research agency of the
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). This
research supports the USDA priority of improving childrens nutrition and
health.